Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

As they say, a city never sleeps. See what the world looks like at night …

Some of the world’s hottest Web 2.0 startups are outside the United States. Find out where they are, and what they’re up to. Read more at CNN Money …

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

[cartoon by Hugh Macleod]

Microsoft will release Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 (codename Orcas) tomorrow (26th July). Keep an eye on the downloads page, which also includes the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1.

I’ve been thinking of internationalization (i18n) and language encoding issues with Feedity for a while, but couldn’t spare enough time to fix it for good. Some Feedity users reported content encoding problems with the generated web feeds for non-English web pages.

Althought Feedity was designed to support some level of Unicode compliance, but still it was not vastly flexible. Finally, I’ve rewritten the Remote Content Handler module of Feedity with much better support for foreign languages. The tricky part was to detect the original character set of the remote webpage (i.e. feed source). I resolved it by first checking the HTTP Response Header “content-type”, and if its invalid or not found, then falling back to the HTML “content-type” meta-tag. That’s the broader resolution, but it can be easily programmed in any language. I’ve successfully implemented it in ASP.NET (C#) for Feedity, and in PHP5 for another project.

If anyone still faces a problem with content encoding of the generated feeds on Feedity, then please contact our dev team.